Melinda Gates has decided to make birth control her signature issue:

Please support our fine nonprofit! Help us with a small deposit. (Why are we rhyming in phrases so terse? Grist’s been cursed by verse! ) Melinda Gates has big plans. (Photo by World Economic Forum) Can Melinda Gates do for family planning what Al Gore did for climate change? Gates has decided to make birth control her signature issue. “My goal is to get this back on the global agenda,” she tells Newsweek . As co-chair of the richest foundation in the world, she might actually be able to do it. The contraceptive cause could certainly use a high-profile advocate: 215 million women [PDF] around the world want to avoid pregnancy but aren’t currently using modern birth control. As Gates explained last month during a TEDxChange presentation on family planning, “This is a life-and-death crisis. Every year, 100,000 women who don’t want to be pregnant die in childbirth. About 600,...